


When the Stars Fall Silent

by Amicia



Series: Sometimes a Fox [3]
Category: Star Wars Legends: The Old Republic
Genre: Acceptance, Death, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Love, Old Age, Pathos, Peace, Sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-21
Updated: 2016-01-21
Packaged: 2018-05-15 09:41:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5781004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amicia/pseuds/Amicia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Paha Fennec and Vector Hyllus pay a final visit to the place they honeymooned.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When the Stars Fall Silent

"Vector, my love," said Paha Fennec one day, somewhat abruptly, "let's go back to Xaastu."

 

He looked at his wife with a smile, the black depths of his eyes tracing her face. It was deeply lined now, and her hair was now snow-white where once it had been the deepest indigo, but it was, as it always had been, the face he had fallen in love with sixty-six years earlier, when he had been such a young man of twenty-six.

 

"Of course, beloved," he answered, holding out his hand. There was a palsied tremor in it now, not extreme, but it had been increasing in severity of late, often in conjunction with a sort of tiredness about his chest. She seemed not to notice it as she placed her hand in his, and his fingers, gnarled by time, smoothed over the paper-fine tissues of her skin.

 

And that was that.

 

Plans were made, and a few things were packed, and, as the familiar old  _Phantom_ had been decommissioned so many years prior - it must be forty, at least, by now - passage was booked.

 

"You're crazy," said the ship's captain, as he saw the field in which he was to leave them.  "I can't leave you two old coots out here!"

 

"We paid you for transportation, not your conscience or your concern," Paha replied crisply.  She was, at ninety-one years of age, as formidable as she had been at twenty-five.  "We have a shelter.  We can take care of ourselves."

 

The captain shook his head dubiously, but nonetheless stomped into his ship and departed.

 

"It's wonderful to be back here again," Paha sighed, breathing in the clean air, scented with the fragrance of familiar silver flowers and their deep red leaves.

 

"We've missed it, too," Vector agreed.  "We aren't sorry to see it again."

 

"One last time," Paha remarked softly.  Something in her voice prompted Vector to look at her intently, and he slipped one thin arm around her shoulders, a bit bonier now than they once had been in the flush of youth.

 

"We're not so very bad off," he answered wryly.

 

There was a short silence.  "Not you," she said finally.  "Me."

 

His arm tightened around her.  "I can feel it, Vector," she said, and both her voice and her aura were full of a sorrowing acceptance and peaceful dignity.  She smiled up at him.  "Death is coming for me.  We've always been so good at dancing a step or two ahead of it, haven't we?  But we always knew it would catch up with us one day.  Let it catch me here."

 

Tears dripped unchecked down the lines of Vector's face.  "Oh, beloved," he said at last, his tremulous voice hoarse and broken.  "Don't.  Don't go where we cannot follow you."

 

She raised her hand, gently soothing the salty trickles from his wrinkled, half-sunk cheeks.  "I'm not likely to have much choice in the matter, am I?"

 

Time, short as it was, stretched before them, and they spent it dwelling in memory, rambling with hobbling, unsturdy steps across the island of their honeymoon, indulging in all the old stories of their shared years, covering the ground with reminisces of where they had once walked so easily, where they had once laughed, where they had once kissed, where they had once made love.

 

One evening, they sat on the cliff with their arms about each other, watching the sun as it drifted towards the purple ocean.  She turned to look at him suddenly, letting the gentle coals of her red eyes stare into the comforting black wells of his.

 

"I love you," she said, as seriously as the first time she had ever spoken the words.  And he knew.  The vibrancy had been fading slowly from her aura, and she had been feeling it slipping away for some time now.

 

"We know," he said softly.  Before her eyes, she watched him change: the dim whiteness returning to the sclera of his eyes, the golden brown color he shared with no one but her.  "I love you," he said, divorcing himself from the Killik hive pluralism.  "I always have.  I always will."

 

"I never doubted it," she answered gently.  "Not once."

 

"Neither did I."  He held her closely and watched the ocean for a while.

 

"Like old times," she murmured after some time.  "You, me, and the sunset."  She turned her head a little, looking at him more closely.  "Aren't you going to change back?"

 

"No," he said, quiet but firm.  It took effort to suppress the bond with the colony, and it tired him far more than it used to, but he was adamant.

 

"If you stay separated," she warned, concerned, "you'll - "

 

"I know.  I'll die."  He kissed her temple.  "Why do you think I'm doing it?  I've given this a lot of thought the past few days.  My time as Dawn Herald is done.  There will be no more dawns for me.  Why should there be, when all the light and music of my world will pass with you?"

 

"Oh, Vector," Paha answered softly, her eyes brimming.  "I was going to try to ask you to live on, for the both of us."

 

"At this age, there doesn't seem much reason to."

 

"It's just as well," she sighed comfortably, with a flash of her old saucy smirk.  "You know I'm too selfish to do it.  I hate the thought of going somewhere you won't be."

 

"And I'm just as selfish, too," Vector answered, feeling, to his mild surprise, entirely secure and tranquil.  "For I hate the thought of you going without me.  I think I'm jealous of death, trying to take you from me.  So I will just have to go with you."

 

"To our next great mission," Paha whispered.

 

"And the next verse in our song."

 

The sun sank lower on the horizon, every second diminishing its arc across the sky as it diminished their lives.  As it slipped into the sea, and washed the skies with pink and purple, she turned her face to his and kissed him, and he closed his eyes as he felt her life and last breath pass from her.  He held her in his arms, and never moved again.

 

The following spring on Xaastu brought a change to one lovely, lonely island.  Among the burgundy leaves of the silver flowers, new blossoms, brilliant blue and gleaming gold like perfect gemstones, raised their smiling faces and danced merrily in the warm embrace of the sun beneath the limpid lilac sky.

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry.
> 
> I has a sad today.


End file.
